Recently I’ve been working on the Python unittest API in my spare time, with a long term goal of making it possible to safely and sensibly glue many different plugins together into the core.

Two important components of that goal are being able to extend the data included in a test result, and being able to change how a test is run (such as adding new exceptions that should be treated as specific outcomes – python unittest uses exceptions to signal outcomes).

In testtools 0.9.2 we have an answer to both those issues. I’m really happy with the data included in outcomes API, ‘TestCase.addDetail’. The API for extending outcomes works, but only addresses part of that issue for now.

Subunit 0.0.4, which is available for older Ubuntu releases in the Subunit releases PPA now, and mostly built on Debian (so it will propogate through to Lucid in due course) has support for the addDetail API. Subunit now depends on testtools, reducing the non-protocol related code and generally making things simpler.

Using those two together, bzr’s parallelised test suite has been improved as well, allowing it to include the log file for tests run in separate processes (previously it was silently discarded). The branch to do this will be merged soon, its just waiting on some sysadmin love to get these new versions into its merge-test environment. This change also provides complete capturing of the log when users want to supply a subunit log containing failed tests. The python code to do this is pretty simple:

I’ve made a couple of point releases to python-junitxml recently, fixing some minor bugs. I need to figure out how to add the extra data that addDetails permits to the xml output. I suspect its a strict superset and so I’ll have to filter stuff down. If anyone knows about similar extensions done to junit’s XML format before, please leave a comment